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South’s documentation talks about this issue:
The issue with teams and migrations occurs when more than one person
makes a migration in the same timeslot, and they both get committed
without the other having been applied. This is analogous to two people
editing the same file in a VCS at the same time, and like a VCS, South
has ways of resolving the problem.If this happens, the first thing to note is that South will detect the
problem, and issue a message like this:Inconsistent migration history The following options are available: --merge: will just attempt the migration ignoring any potential dependency conflicts.
If you re-run migrate with
--merge
, South will simply apply the
migrations that were missing out-of-order. This usually works, as
teams are working on separate models; if it doesn’t, you’ll need to
look at the actual migration changes and resolve them manually, as
it’s likely they’ll conflict.The second thing to note is that, when you pull in someone else’s
model changes complete with their own migration, you’ll need to make a
new empty migration that has the changes from both branches of
development frozen in (if you’ve used mercurial, this is equivalent to
a merge commit). To do so, simply run:./manage.py schemamigration --empty appname merge_models
(Note that
merge_models
is just a migration name; change it for
whatever you like)The important message here is that South is no substitute for team
coordination – in fact, most of the features are there purely to warn
you that you haven’t coordinated, and the simple merging on offer is
only there for the easy cases. Make sure your team know who is working
on what, so they don’t write migrations that affect the same parts of
the DB at the same time.